Toyota Hilux is the business
Apart from a Buzzy Bee wrapped in a Swanndri, is there anything more truly Kiwi than a 4WD Toyota Hilux with a flat deck, wonders
Utes have rapidly become a popular lifestyle/family vehicle since their mid and top-spec variants have moved far from their working roots, but there is still room – and demand – for a tough, rugged workhorse.
In New Zealand, that’ll be your trusty four-wheel-drive cab chassis model with a flat deck, then.
So this is a stripped-out bargain-basement rugged workhorse then?
Well. . . not exactly, because while it does without much in the way of exterior bling, this is still a midspec SR – which means you still get quite a lot of good stuff, like the big 8-inch infotainment touchscreen, voice recognition, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and a sixspeaker audio system.
Also, the entire Hilux range now comes standard with Toyota’s Safety Sense system that includes driver assists like adaptive cruise control, lane departure alert and assist, autonomous emergency braking with cyclist and pedestrian detection and road sign recognition, as well as trailer sway control and much more, so you are hardly talking a stripped-out, barebones model here.
The SR cab/chassis is pretty much what it says on the box – a mid-spec Hilux without a wellside tray that you can slap a good, tough, functional flat deck on and do good, honest Kiwi bloke (or blokette) things with, like put the dogs on the back to go hunting or take the farm quad into town to get it fixed after you tore the rear guard off trying to squeeze it past the tractor because you couldn’t be bothered moving it.
Yeah, I grew up in the King Country and worked at a farm machinery dealership. I know what farmers are like. . .
As such, the cab chassis version of the SR comes in at $49,490 (for the automatic we tested here – the manual is $46,990), leaving you to slap on the flat deck (or some other configuration) of your choice, although Toyota will sell you one too.
So otherwise it’s just a normal Hilux SR with a flat deck?
Well. . . obviously, yes. Which means it’s every bit as good as the rest of the range.
The myriad refinements and tweaks made by Toyota for its recent facelift saw the Hilux elevated to the point we gave it our Top Ute nod last year, and everything we liked about it then still stands in the SR cab chassis.
Refinement and ride comfort are both up on the previous model, thanks to suspension tweaks, and the four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine is also more powerful and has been retuned to offer better response and refinement across its rev range.
From the driver’s seat you wouldn’t pick the SR cab chassis as your farm-spec workhorse, as it is every bit as refined and modern as, say, an SR5 Cruiser, just without the fancy seats and carpet.
Around town, it is manoeuvrable and easy to live with, and out on the open road it is capable and confident, with a morethan-acceptable ride.
Not a lot has been drastically changed for the refreshed Hilux, but the culmination of lots of little tweaks is more than noticeable.
Is it almost too fancy to hit the back blocks?
Not at all. The Hilux remains impressively capable off the sealed stuff, with the recent suspension tweaks making it even better, in comfort and capability.
Dropping it into low range is simplicity itself, as it has been for some time, with a brief twist of a dial and when the right light pops up, you’re away.
The 6-speed transmission has nicely-spaced ratios (as it does in high range on the road) and the Hilux is incredibly capable off-road in a pure mechanical sense, before you even need to think about things like hill descent control and other assists.
It is also still ruggedly functional, despite niceties like touchscreen infotainment systems and climate control. Those things just happen to be a nice techy icing on the Hilux’s cake.
Aren’t flat decks a pain because they stick out so far either side of the cab though?
While a flat deck used to be the perfect way for the unwary driver to run a quite spectacular gouge down the side of some other poor sod’s car in the local Four Square parking lot, that isn’t so much the case today.
That’s not because flat decks are narrower, but rather that a lot of utes have got to the size that the cabs are as wide as the flat decks, which is certainly the case with the Hilux.
While this means it is no longer quite so easy to tear up the side of the Honda Jazz owned by Dorothy who works behind the bar at the local RSA, it does mean that the SR suffers from the same affliction as all modern utes, in that it is getting quite large now.
Still, that said, it’s not large enough to be truly painful (like a truly massive United States pickup), just large enough that Dorothy’s Jazz might leave a mark on your door as she awkwardly tries to squeeze into her car because you haven’t left her enough room.
Any other cars to consider?
Well, there’s no shortage of choice here – pretty much every carmaker that does a ladder chassis ute offers a cab/chassis option in some form, so your choices range from the $26,990 LDV T60 (admittedly only a single cab manual) to the $57,690 Ford Ranger double cab auto, with everything else in between.
But like the rest of the Hilux range, Toyota’s aggressive fixed pricing makes an incredibly strong value-for-money argument for the SR cab/chassis. Particularly if you want a well-equipped workhorse with the performance, handling and ride comfort of a top-spec ute.